Shaped or cut bone segments have been used extensively to solve various medical problems in human and animal orthopedic surgical practice, and their application has also extended to the field of cosmetic and reconstructive surgery, dental reconstructive surgery, and other medical fields involving surgery of hard tissues. The use of autograft bone (where the patient provides the source), allograft bone (where another individual of the same species provides the source) or xenograft bone (where another individual of a different species provides the source) is well known in both human and veterinary medicine. In particular, transplanted bone is known to provide support, promote healing, fill bony cavities, separate bony elements (such as vertebral bodies), promote fusion (where bones are induced to grow together into a single, solid mass), or stabilize the sites of fractures. More recently, processed bone has been developed into shapes for use in new surgical applications, or as new materials for implants that were historically made of non-biologically derived materials.
Bone grafting applications are differentiated by the requirements of the skeletal site. Certain applications require a "structural graft" in which one role of the graft is to provide mechanical or structural support to the site. Such grafts contain a substantial portion of mineralized bone tissue to provide the strength needed for load-bearing. The graft may also have beneficial biological properties, such as incorporation into the skeleton, osteoinduction, osteoconduction, or angiogenesis.
Structural grafts are conventionally made by processing, and then cutting or otherwise shaping cortical bones collected for transplant purposes. The range of bone grafts that might be thus prepared is limited by the size and shape limitations of the bone tissue from which the bone graft originated. Certain clinically desirable shapes and sizes of grafts may thus be unattainable by the cutting and shaping processes, due to the dimensional limitations of the bone. For some shapes they may also be available only in limited amounts, due to the large variations inherent in the human or animal donor source populations.
Many structural allografts are never fully incorporated by remodeling and replacement with host tissue due, in part, to the difficulty with which the host's blood supply may penetrate cortical bone, and partly to the poor osteoinductivity of nondemineralized bone. To the extent that the implant is incorporated and replaced by living host bone tissue, the body can then recognize and repair damage, thus eliminating failure by fatigue. In applications where the mechanical load-bearing requirements of the graft are challenging, lack of replacement by host bone tissue may compromise the graft by subjecting it to repeated loading and cumulative unrepaired damage (mechanical fatigue) within the implant material. Thus, it is highly desirable that the graft have the capacity to support load initially, and be capable of gradually transferring this load to the host bone tissue as it remodels the implant.